


Pinpricks

by Kirschwasser-dVodka (ScherbenByOpium)



Category: Rammstein
Genre: M/M, Till., ah well, but kinda isn't, was supposed to be slashier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-30
Updated: 2013-10-30
Packaged: 2017-12-31 00:08:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1024998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScherbenByOpium/pseuds/Kirschwasser-dVodka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Till doesn't have to be kind. In this case, he isn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pinpricks

**Author's Note:**

> This is one half-assed clump -_-

When longing hits him, it hits like a spray of finely-tipped needles, and it’s so subtle and so quiet that at first he doesn’t notice.

They nestle inside him, patiently unobtrusive, as he goes about his little routines, small, familiar gestures that he can cling on to and pack in a flight case to take with him through the dizzying whirl of keycards and pyrotechnics and flashes of piercing white lights that is his life.

He likes to keep his guitar picks in a shallow disc of woven willow on the windowsill, and when he is upset or unsettled, he sometimes locks the door to seek refuge in the neat whorls of glass and acrylic, arranging and re-arranging them. Whole hours often slip by this way: he leaning his cheek against the glass, a quiet click, click the only sound in the room as various colourful displays fan out on the reddish-gold weave.

Recently, he’s taken to hovering over his art platter late into the night, constantly changing and improving. Perhaps all the way through the night as well, though none of the rest of them has been bothered to stay awake to find out yet. They don’t bring such a pointless thing up, either, when they gather briefly at mealtimes, each of them silent in his own way.

Ollie, withdrawn into some world of his own that the others can’t reach and aren’t interested in fathoming, puts away his food and scurries away. Paul is uncharacteristically quiet, and chews over whatever’s put in front of him with a distinctly mournful air. Flake looks at each of them with cynicism glittering in his eyes, and after a while they all learn to keep their eyes turned towards their own plates. It doesn’t make the scrutiny any the easier to ignore. Till especially seems to find it hard to bear, gripping his cutlery rather harder than usual, and breaking the rules a few times to swing his edgy, furious gaze up to meet Flake’s intolerably cool one.

(Schneider keeps his curly head down and does his best to focus on his sausages. Good boy.)

The tension then is static, and none of them can bear it. It scratches and whines inside their heads; they hunch their shoulders and clench their teeth, but it’s no good. The feeling only dissipates when Till wrenches his eyes away from Flake to send death-glares to his omelette.

Those times, the surface had been stretched _so thin_. But in the end, it is always the one rule that is never broken that wins out: Till doesn’t shout at Flake.

Still, every time, they are relieved that it does.

They did find a few bent forks tossed carelessly into the trash a few days ago, though.

And Richard, he looks around the table when Flake isn’t – he can’t stand the thought of meeting eyes – and mulls over what satisfaction it would be to smash each and every one of his bandmates into a million itty bitty little pieces.

He cooks when he’s irritated, slinking down the stairs at four in the morning just to prepare the simple meal of breakfast. It’s not so much out of care or consideration for the others, than the cold little curl of relish he gets from watching a previously-spotless pan slowly blacken, the first twists of smoke jabbing upwards in dry, angry hisses.

He’s been cooking a lot. More often than not, he burns the breakfast.

The others don’t say anything; they know better. They only have to take one look at the ragged ends of his nails, the haphazard way his shirt hangs off him, the touches of bruises under his eyes, to know that if they do, why, Richard might just flip and take all the rest of the precarious, messy, _insane_ Jenga tower they’ve got going on here with him.

There is a storm hanging over them, low enough for them to feel its suffocating oppression, and they feel it the strongest when they’re all sitting around the same table, each shuddering to themselves that it was going to break, soon, and when it did, it would be messy.

\--

One miserable morning, Richard almost drops the still-sizzling frying pan onto Till’s lap.

He isn’t sure why, or how. One moment he’s grimly scraping some of the decidedly charred mess onto Till’s plate, and then there had somehow been a shift in time and now fingers are curling limp and loose around the frying-pan’s handle.

He might be able to see the listless digits better had Till not had his own hand firmly wrapped around both his and the handle in one remarkable curve. He stares dazedly first at the vaguely surreal image that every now and then blurs and distorts like a mirage, or the world seen through the flickering haze of fire, then at Till, when the other man finally loses patience and quite deliberately opens his palm.

His fingers slip; the pan drops. The crash of shaken cutlery and shattered crockery is _quite something_ , if only for the fact that it makes Schneider, Ollie, Flake and Paul fall under the same sudden hush. A miracle for the ages, that one.

The hints of a crooked grin creep round the edges of Till’s lips. He appears unconcerned that none of what he’s just wreaked havoc on is his property to destroy.

“You’re tired,” he leans forwards and almost sings, softly-softly. Well, if he hadn’t kicked into smithereens the rule of silence before, he certainly has now. “Or maybe you’ve just inhaled too much smoke.”

Richard has the urge to shake his head like a dog to clear it – Till’s words are sliding past each other, and the more he tries to make sense of them, the further they slip apart and away from him. _You’re tired._ But how?

“ _It’s catching up to you, you know._ ”

And sleep-deprived as Richard might be, and as much as it seems that Till is talking about his new-found nocturnal habits, he doesn’t miss the ominous, almost playful tone Till says it in.

Absent-mindedly, he rubs his fingers, and heads upstairs. They feel as if they’ve been pricked by pins.

\--

It gets worse. His exhausted body stutters and stalls, and the stairs are a thing of increasing difficulty to him. Once, he stumbles and it is Flake who has to grab him by the wrist before he falls, and practically drag him up the steps with an inscrutable expression. Richard thinks it might hold contempt, however, and he opens his mouth to tell the keyboardist that _he isn’t much better himself_ , but evidently physical co-ordination isn’t the only thing lacking, and in the end he gives up trying to struggle the words out. Flake had gone, anyway.

His sense of direction fails him, too, and he often finds himself wandering aimlessly along the corridors. In one of his more lucid moments he comes to the realisation that there wouldn’t really be much to do otherwise, and he wonders without much interest how the others are amusing themselves. Till and Flake, the ever-mysterious fuckers, barricade themselves in their rooms all day, and Ollie and Schneider are never anywhere to be seen. And since not a peep’s to be heard from dear little Paul, either, Richard could only assume he dies daily until it was time for breakfast again.

Whatever. What his bandmates while away the time with doesn’t matter; what does is that he’s bored.

He only knows to appreciate _that_ when the needle on his internal compass completely cops out and decides to spin him by Till’s room.

\--

Nothing doing. The door only opens wide enough for Till’s disembodied voice to tell him, quite flatly, to fuck off.

It stings rather more than it should. Hurt, and more awake than he’s been the past half week, Richard promptly makes good use of this rediscovered rationality to wonder whether someone wasn’t practising voodoo on him.

That would be Paul, the vengeful little bastard, who’d already told him time and again that he didn’t like eggs for breakfast. Well, it isn’t _Richard’s_ fault that no-one could be bothered to go out and do the grocery shopping, and whichever genius had stocked up the fridge (with a fair tonne of eggs) didn’t seem inclined to step up and do it again. How inconsistent.

Thinking again, perhaps he isn’t as awake as he’d thought.

\--

He knows it’s a rare moment when he catches sight of Till sitting on one of the stone benches outside, a bow to his head and an uneasy arch to his back, and he hurries across the slabs to approach him.

Till barely raises his head to apprehend him, but allows him a sullen nod nevertheless.

‘Hello’ would seem unnecessary; ‘Till’, redundant. He didn’t want to sound either, not now, and especially not in front of Till, who would probably swoop on it at once, and savage relentlessly, pushing and pushing at Richard because he was in one of _those_ moods.

He perches uncertainly on the edge of the seat, the stone seeping cold to the backs of his thighs. He’s a respectable distance away from Till – which means that he’s far away enough to be able to scramble to safety if that brooding mass over there suddenly decides to lash out for no reason at all – but inexplicably enough he wishes it were closer. He yearns for closer, and the longing is like the burn of fire when he doesn’t want it to burn.

He’s sick to death of this. The silence – not just now, but over the whole time they’ve been here – is sour, stagnant, putrid. He wants to smash it, has done so for a while, but isn’t sure how.

(Yesterday, he stretched his hand out like a trouble-making kid and swiped everything on his windowsill – papers, pens, picks and all – onto the ground. Even looking, fascinated, at the scattered fragments of blue and red and black littering the ground like confetti, he hadn’t thought to use them.)

“Till,” he tries.

The motionless bulk beside him doesn’t even stir from scowling intently at the ivy running the whole length of the villa’s walls. Richards can’t help giving it a glance, tugged in by curiosity at what Till could possibly be so entranced in. He shouldn’t have expected anything more, but there’s still a slight twinge of disappointment when all he sees is waxy yellow leaves splayed out like gecko’s feet, shot through with diseased-looking green.

The silence is very obviously a gap; with Till on one side and Richard frantically waving his arms on the other, despairing that he’ll ever be able to see past it. Which he can’t, not unless Till extends a bridge.

Till doesn’t do unnecessary.

He should know better, after having known Till so long. Well. One didn’t really get to _know_ Till, really, and his charm was all in the enigma, but nor should they be sitting on their (freezing, on his part, at least) asses like complete strangers (except strangers didn’t usually have animosity smouldering somewhere in the background) because it isn’t fucking charming at all.

He glares stubbornly at the rotting leaves that blur under the stinging in his eyes, and doesn’t try again.


End file.
